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Our Approach to RKF Our goal: SME’s build knowledge bases by simply instantiating and assembling pre-built components. Our approach: We build a Component Library containing representations of domain-specific concepts as well as common:  actions, such as Get and Enter  states, such as Be-Attached-To  entities, such as Barrier and Catalyst  property values, such as three microns and rapid And we develop computational methods for:  combining them and  using them to answer questions.

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Generic Actions About 200 actions, in about 20 clusters, based on linguistic studies and other KB projects Are these sufficient? –Yes, based on an analysis of 6 chapters of the Alberts text and the encoding of much of chapter 7 –To test their coverage outside microbiology, we’ll be building dozens of KB’s this semester –Our Component Evaluation will provide hard data Why keep it small? –So the Library will be easy to learn and use –So we can provide rich semantics for each action

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Generic States A state, such as Be-Attached-To, represents a “temporarily stable” set of properties. It serves to link: –An action that creates the state (i.e. Attach) –An action that ends the state (i.e. Detach) –Those actions that are affected by the state (e.g. Move)

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Generic Entities small number of role concepts, defined by their participation in actions or states. Examples: container, sequence, nutrient, portal, portal covering

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Generic Relations small number (78) of very general relations –Roles, such as agent, object, instrument, location –Properties, such as size, shape, frequency, direction Why keep it small? –So the Library will be easy to learn and use –So we can provide rich semantics for each relation

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Summary SME assembles a declarative representation from both generic and domain-specific components –SME specifies only the components and the links in the assembly; most of the complexity within components is kept “under the hood” KANAL can “exercise” the declarative representation, verifying completeness and consistency KM’s simulator can execute the declarative representation to answer questions